In early April, Speaker O’Neill was set to lead a thirteen-member bipartisan congressional delegation to Moscow. Republican leader Bob Michel would join him. Before departing, they visited the president at the White House. “Just wanted a last min. briefing & our blessing,” Reagan jotted in his diary. “Gave them both.” But, along with his blessing, he also gave O’Neill a letter to hand personally to Soviet general secretary Gorbachev. He asked also that Tip convey with it a simple message. He wanted him to assure the new man at the top in the Kremlin on two accounts: one, the degree to which Americans were united; two, the sincerity of Ronald Reagan in his desire for meaningful negotiations. As O’Neill biographer John Aloysius Farrell wrote, the Speaker made for “a particularly credible messenger,” given the frequency with which he’d shown himself at odds over Reagan’s policies and his criticism of his past opposition to nuclear arms treaties.
When O’Neill was asked what he intended to tell Mikhail Gorbachev, if the Soviet leader inquired about President Reagan, he answered without even an instant’s hesitation. “I’m going to tell him that he got fifty-nine percent of the vote and he whaled my party!”
• • •
“We have a mutual friend,” the new Soviet leader, networking from the start, said as he greeted his guest that April day in Moscow. He was referring to Archer Daniels Midland’s Dwayne Andreas. It had been Andreas who’d passed word to O’Neill four years earlier how impressed the Soviet leaders had been by Reagan’s decisive handling of the air traffic controllers’ strike. Though at first, drumming his fingers and checking his watch before his visitors entered the room, Gorbachev seemed intent on a brisk meeting, he quickly turned into a man with questions and plenty of time on hand to get them answered. Bob Michel, the top Republican on the trip, saw that Gorbachev had his notes marked in different colors for the main points he intended to make. In the end, his session with the O’Neill delegation lasted nearly four hours.
Because O’Neill was carrying a letter from the president, a Republican, he was quick to clarify his role in the American political system. “I’m part of the opposition,” he explained. “We’re trying to understand what the position of the opposition is,” Gorbachev shot back, intrigued, “as well as the position of those in power.” “There’s a big difference,” Tip replied. “On some questions, we don’t agree on everything.”
Later, Tip recounted his Kremlin experience this way:
I remember when I went in first to meet with him, face-to-face, just the two of us, he spoke to me in English. He said, “You are the leader of the opposition.” He said, “I do not know what the opposition means, Democrat, Republican, you all oppose Communism.”
I said, “Mr. Gorbachev, let me say this to you: At home, on the domestic front, we have issues and we have opposition philosophically, oftentimes on foreign affairs. But when the President of the United States goes to Geneva with you, he is representing our country, and we talk as one. So yes, you may say you do not know what the opposition is because both Democrats and Republicans are opposed to communism. But we stand together in support of the President of the United States, not only Tip O’Neill, but the party that I stand for, and the party that I represent, and the Congress of the United States.”
After the encounter, he’d been impressed if not completely overwhelmed. What he found familiar was that Gorbachev reminded him of a “New York lawyer.” He was, Tip said, “a master of words and a master in the art of politics and diplomacy.” Also, he “had a flair about him. He had charisma about him. He had a Western style.”
The letter O’Neill brought with him confirmed Ronald Reagan’s desire—relayed originally by George Bush when attending the Chernenko funeral—to meet with the new Soviet leader. Tip praised Gorbachev’s positive reaction. “I think it augurs well for world peace when the two dominant nations of the world can get at the table and sit down. . . . If they only keep talking that’s the most important thing.” He had no worries, he added, about the possibility of Gorbachev outmatching Reagan. “. . . The president will be able to handle himself,” he told the press. “Don’t you worry about the president.”
It was hard to be impressed by what I saw of the Soviet Union’s economic development,” Tip later noted. “I’ll never forget the ride into Moscow from the airport: the countryside seemed unbelievably dismal. We stayed in a government-owned hotel where the beds were so small that I had to put two of them together—and it still wasn’t big enough. Inside the Kremlin walls, however, the buildings were fantastic. And although the Russians are officially atheists, I’ve never seen so many carefully preserved paintings of the saints.
And when he and others in the delegation met afterward with President Reagan to report on their trip, Tip had a striking revelation to share that had come of the conversation with the new Soviet leader. The single thing that seemed most to bother Mikhail Gorbachev had been the American president’s characterization of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.”
• • •
The plan was for Reagan and Gorbachev to hold their first summit in Geneva, site of the ongoing nuclear arms talks. Trying to ensure that the president arrived in Switzerland with a politically united Congress behind him, Tip O’Neill called for a cease-fire in the two parties’ current disputes over government spending. Above all, this meant the question of appropriations for national defense. A short-term agreement between the Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill would permit Reagan to enter talks free of simmering partisan debate back home. “We need to clear the decks for the President in Geneva,” the Speaker said on the eve of the leaders’ meeting.
When President Reagan meets with Mr. Gorbachev next week he deserves the support of all Americans regardless of party or philosophy. In Geneva, there will be only one American spokesman. There will be only one American having both the authority and the mandate to build a secure peace. That man is the president of the United States.
We Americans know the awesome stakes of this summit. We also know the difficulties. The United States and the Soviet Union have major disagreements. Some of our differences may simply be insurmountable, regardless of the wisdom and good will that is shown next week. But we also believe there are encouraging signs that progress can be made in Geneva. The greatest challenge, and the highest priority in Geneva, must be to reduce the risk of nuclear war.
O’Neill was guarding his party as well as his country. He was giving Reagan no opportunity to blame the Democrats if the summit went badly. He wanted all the authority—and, with it, all the responsibility—in Reagan’s hands alone. “I don’t want to send the president to meet Mr. Gorbachev in a position where he doesn’t dare pick up the check.”
Reagan, for his part, clearly hoped to forge an ongoing personal connection with the new Soviet leader. To this end, he even made a special point of scoping out ahead of time the room where he’d meet with him, “where I hope to get Gorbachev aside for a one on one.” The president would later write that he’d headed off to Geneva convinced that the new leader of the Soviet Union wanted a deal for the very basic reason that he needed one. “He had to know we could outspend the Soviets on weapons as long as we wanted to.” Not all that long ago, Gorbachev had been complaining openly—more like a small businessman than a world leader—to Tip and his delegation about the “gold rubles” he was spending that year to keep his arms negotiators in place at the Geneva bargaining table. If he had to worry about the per diem costs of his diplomats, how could he match Reagan’s challenge on futuristic missile defense?
Once they’d opened their discussions, the two men’s real differences, especially over Reagan’s proposed missile shield system, soon came to the fore. The American president argued that “Star Wars” was intended to serve defensively only; the Soviet leader saw it differently. In his mind, it would allow the United States to deliver not just a first strike but one made with impunity. This is despite Reagan’s offer to share the technology with the Soviets once it had been developed. “It�
��s not convincing,” Gorbachev challenged him. “It opens up an arms race in space.”
Yet progress was being made, and much of it was personal. Here’s Reagan’s account. “That evening it was our turn to host dinner and I saw, as I had the night before when the Soviets had entertained us, that Gorbachev could be warm and outgoing in a social setting even though several hours earlier we’d had sharp differences of opinion; maybe there was a little of Tip O’Neill in him. He could tell jokes about himself and even about his country, and I grew to like him more.”
The Geneva summit, at its close, was pronounced a success, yielding as it did agreements for similar future meetings in both Washington and Moscow, as well as a pledge to cut the two countries’ nuclear weapons stockpiles in half.
To trumpet the president’s success and bring home to the American public this historic first thawing of the Cold War, the White House decided, once again, to go for its own version of street theater. The scenario called for the president to arrive back from Geneva onto the very steps of the Capitol—there to report, with full silver-screen drama, to a joint session of Congress.
But that wasn’t all. “In an unusual procedure,” the Speaker announced on the morning of the Reagan return, “I have been asked by the White House to go with Bob Dole to greet the president of the United States and to fly by helicopter back here with him. And Mrs. O’Neill has been asked to be seated with Mrs. Reagan, which is an unusual circumstance.
“I expect a full report, a true report of what happened. It will not be partisan whatsoever. I am more than delighted that there will be continued talks with Gorbachev coming here next year and our president going over there the year after. As long as we are sitting at the table, although we might not always get along, there is the possibility that something can be agreed upon.”
That night, introduced by the Speaker, President Reagan expressed his gratitude. “You can’t imagine how much it means in dealing with the Soviets to have the Congress, the allies and the American people firmly behind you.” After five hours of one-on-one meetings with Gorbachev, he obviously was feeling positive, saluting his Soviet counterpart for, among other attributes, being a “good listener.” As for more substantial aspects of the exchange now placed on the table, Reagan cited a proposed 50 percent cut in nuclear arms and a plan to eliminate all intermediate-range missiles in Europe. “The summit itself was a good start,” he concluded, “and now our byword must be: steady as we go.”
Both as theatrics and as politics, the president’s appearance counted as a hit. “I haven’t gotten such a reception since I was shot,” he wrote. “The gallerys were full & members wouldn’t stop clapping & cheering.”
A date for a second Reagan-Gorbachev meeting was eventually set for the fall of the following year in Iceland. In the run-up, Tip O’Neill found himself playing a quiet but consequential role. The nuclear “freeze” faction of the Democrat membership had by then revved itself up and, no longer willing to wait, was demanding action. Indeed, the time had come for an up-or-down call on the whole panoply of nuclear arms issues. Congressmen Ron Dellums and Edward Markey believed they stood at a great moment in history, one in which they could frame clearly the grand goal of global nuclear disarmament.
The Speaker summoned a meeting in his office. Bluntly, he warned what would happen if Reagan failed at Reykjavik. They and the other Democratic doves would bring the weight of the blame upon the entire party. Tip prevailed. It was better to wait, as both Dellums and Markey accepted, even though having to delay their crusade against nuclear arms proliferation was “heartbreaking,” as Dellums put it. Yet not even the freeze leaders themselves could have predicted that Reagan and Gorbachev would themselves talk of eliminating all nuclear weapons.
For those of us who’d spent our early youth hiding beneath our fragile wooden school desks imagining a nuclear air raid, a seismic change was occurring. Despite the roadblock at Reykjavik—Reagan’s insistence on strategic defense—the scene of two superpowers headed toward Armageddon had evanesced. Suddenly, the world might no longer be the one we’d known since the early 1950s. Mikhail Gorbachev understood what was happening. “This,” he told Steingrímur Hermannsson, the Icelandic prime minister, as they stood together on the tarmac in the sleeting rain, “is the beginning of the end of the Cold War.”
Tip O’Neill secretly begged Reagan to win Margaret Thatcher’s backing for a new British policy toward Northern Ireland. It began the process toward reconciliation between Protestant and Catholic in Ulster.
CHAPTER TWENTY
HURRAH!
“What matters most about political ideas is the underlying emotions, the music to which ideas are a mere libretto, often of very inferior quality.”
—SIR LEWIS NAMIER
Both Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill were American Irish, but different kinds. One was the corner buddy, staying close to home, holding fast to his tribal identity. The other was the rambling boy, making his name and fame elsewhere. It explains why they shared their Irish stories differently. Reagan offered his, theatrically, with a brogue, just as he’d done for that Vegas revue he’d once briefly emceed. Tip’s anecdotes came with his DNA, I’d say. But he’d also accumulated a useful collection over the years, heard at weddings and christenings and a thousand political dinners.
Reagan, raised Protestant by his Scots-English mother, over the years was in danger of forgetting the other half of his bloodline. His heavy-drinking Catholic father was a beloved, if embarrassing, connection to the religion Reagan would refer to, without animus, as “Bells and smells.” Pat O’Brien was another reminder of the old sod when he welcomed the young man starting to make his way in Hollywood into the clan at the Warner Bros. commissary.
“I knew I was Irish even before I knew I was American,” wrote Tip when he sat down to look back on his life. At the age of seven, he’d been enrolled in a Gaelic language school. Around him was a world of families that closely resembled his, yet as he grew up, signs in shopwindows still warned: NINA. NO IRISH NEED APPLY. For the likes of Tip and his peers, they mirrored the anti-Catholic bigotry across the Atlantic that kept Northern Ireland a battle zone. Tip also remembered other signs from those days—I GAVE TO THE ARMY being one. It meant a contribution had been made to the Irish Republican Army.
Like so many in his community, O’Neill had loyally supported the IRA up through the late 1950s. However, as the situation changed, so did his thinking. With the eruption of the bloody violence—“the Troubles”—in the era that followed, he began to question the conventional Irish-American habits of mind he’d previously taken for granted. What now became apparent to him was that the struggle between nationalist and loyalist in Northern Ireland would not, in the end, be decided by gun and bomb.
Influenced by John Hume, a Northern Ireland nationalist leader pressing for a nonviolent approach to the rights of the Catholic minority, Tip and three other well-respected Irish-American politicians—Senator Edward Kennedy, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and New York governor Hugh Carey—had joined forces in 1977. All four men recognized the truth of what Hume urged, that the continuous flow of Irish-American dollars funding the IRA arms stockpile had to stop. They also understood that the Protestant majority was never going to give up its loyalty to Britain, while, at the same time, the minority Catholics should never have to accept second-class status. Any agreement arrived at, they knew, would need to be based upon democratic principles, and if Northern Ireland were ever to join the Republic of Ireland, it would have to be by majority vote.
Dubbed the “Four Horsemen” in honor of the famed Notre Dame backfield of 1924, Tip and his cohort made themselves first heard on St. Patrick’s Day of 1977 in a statement that called for an end to the sectarian killing and encouraged the possibility of dialogue. While the new approach stirred anger by the hard-liners, it began to show results. Tip, speaking for the other “Horsemen,” found a key ally in Jimmy Carter. Always an advocate for human rights, President Carter now tried pushin
g the British government for a settlement in Northern Ireland, and promised U.S. aid as a way of sweetening the initiative.
As I’ve shown, from the moment they met, Tip O’Neill accepted Ronald Reagan as a fellow Irish-American, sharing jokes and stories. He made an annual ritual of hosting a St. Patrick’s Day lunch in the Speaker’s dining room, with the president always the guest of honor. When Tip visited Ireland in April 1984, just prior to a Reagan arrival there that June, he set about smoothing the way for the president, wanting to be sure he was treated properly. (The Speaker, I should add, loved noting that the name of the president’s ancestral village, Ballyporeen—to which Reagan intended paying the expected pilgrimage—was Gaelic for “valley of the small potatoes.”)
Upon arrival, Reagan was delighted with his reception and repaid Tip’s courtesy by calling his Democratic rival “a great son of Ireland and America.” Their shared heritage was, he joked, “part of our blood. . . . That’s what I keep telling myself every time I try to iron out my differences with the speaker of our House of Representatives, a lad by the name of Tip O’Neill.”
In Dublin, Reagan addressed the lower house of the Irish national parliament on June 4, and opened by describing how, when he’d landed at Shannon a few days earlier, “something deep inside began to stir.” He then reminded his listeners that the first Washington embassy he’d officially visited, upon becoming president, had been Ireland’s. “I’m proud that our administration is blessed by so many cabinet members of Irish extraction.” Pause. “Indeed, I had to fight them off Air Force One or there wouldn’t be anyone tending the store while we’re gone.” Then, quickly, he got serious.
Although the bulk of his speech looked beyond Irish borders to larger East-West issues—the spread of “democratic development,” and U.S. efforts at ensuring global security—Reagan first spoke forcefully of the need for peace in Ireland, north and south. “All sides should have one goal before them,” he said, “and let us state it simply and directly: to end the violence, to end it completely, and to end it now.” Yet he made clear the United States’ position was only one of solidarity. “We must not and will not interfere in Irish matters nor prescribe to you solutions or formulas. But I want you to know that we pledge to you our goodwill and support, and we’re with you as you work toward peace.”
Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked Page 30
